The Rhetoric of a Health Technology: The Microprocessor Patient Card

Literature discussing rhetoric is mainly concerned with rhetoric per se — its structure, and the categorization of arguments by kind. Rarely do rhetorical studies examine the actual effects on audiences, and auditors' reactions. On the other hand, sociological studies of scientific controversies look at rhetoric — or argumentation — in action, but with few references to rhetorical studies. The purpose of this paper is to integrate rhetorical studies into the sociology of technology in order to integrate the concept of action into discourse analysis. I intend to show how the use of discourse to enroll actors in a health technology is intimately linked to action. I deconstruct the promoters' strategy into two discurseive components — the utility component and the fear-reduction component — to show how the rhetoric of expectations (utility) and representations (fear) contingently shape the fate of a technology.